Great Minds Part V:

Modernism and the Age of Analysis

About the Professors
Darren M. Staloff, Ph. D.
Assistant Professor of History,
The City College of New York

Darren Staloff received his A.B. from Columbia College in 1983 and
his M.A. from Columbia University in 1985. He then went on to
receive his M. Phil. in 1986 and his Ph.D. in 1991, both from
Columbia University.

Currently an assistant professor at the City College of New York,

Staloff recently served as a Post-Doctoral Felow at the Institute for
Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, Virginia. He
also spent three years as a preceptor of Contemporary Civilization at
Columbia University.

Professor Staloff has also been the recipient of such fellowships and
awards as the National Endowment of Humanities Fellow ( 1992),
the President's Fellow at Columbia University (1984-1985), and as a
Harry J. Carman Scholar at Columbia University (19834984).

Papers that Staloff has authored and delivered in: "Search for a
Polity: The Formation of Church and State Polities in Early
Massachusetts," (1991), "Puritanism as a Social and Political
Movement," ( 1990), and "Women 's Roles, Women 's Spheres: The
Problem of Metapholical Discourse in Women's History," (1985).

1994 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 1

 Michael Sugrue, Ph. D
Mellon Post-doctoral Fellow, The Johns Hopkins University

Michael Sugrue received his B.A. in history at the University of

Chicago in 1979 and his M.A. and M. Phil. from Columbia University
between 1980 and 1991. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia
University's Department of History in May 1992.

Among the universities and colleges where Professor Sugrue has held
an instructor or lecturer position are, The City College, Columbia
University; Manhattan College, New York University; Hampton
University; and Touro College. He has been awarded the
Chamberlain Fellowship, the President's Fellowship, the John Jay
Fellowship, the Meyer Padva Prize, and he won first prize in the Phi
Betta Kappa essay competition at the University of Chicago in 1979.

Sugrue wrote the section "Consciousness in the Mandan Conception

of History, A Critical Schematization," in Auslegung (1982). He
currently has three works in progress: "Portrait of the Artist as
Philosophical Oxymoron: The Illusion of Nietzschean Nihilism," "The
Kantian Polilics of Woodrow Wilson," and "A Theory of Political Party
Systems." Professor Sugrue now serves as the Mellon Post-doctoral
Fellow at The Johns Hopkins University.

2 1994 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

Lecture One: Nietzsche's Critique of Christianity:
The Genealogy of Morals

Professor Michael Sugrue

I. Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most important philosphers

in the tradition of western thought. He is also one of the most
artistic, ruthless, and fascinating individuals in the intellectual
history of the West.
A. He viewed himself as the end of the Western intellectual
tradition. He saw himself as the destroyer of metaphysics and
Christianity and as a combination philosopher/artist, in the
tradition of Plato.
B. H e o ffe re d a co mp re he n sive c ritiqu e o f the We ste rn
intellectual tradition, not conceived narrowly as a
philosophical tradition, but as a cultural tradition.
C. Nietzsche was a philosopher of culture. He offered criticism of
every element in Western culture and his criticism is
note worth y fo r its refu sal to co mp ro mise and for h is
in sis te n c e th a t we g e t to th e p s yc h o lo g ic a l h e a rt o f
everything.

II. One of Nietzsche's most intriguing books, Beyond Good and Evil,
criticized morality.
A. He wants to take an extremely skeptical approach to moral
theory and moral evaluation. He wishes to offer a criticism of
Christianity and the values it represents and to supplant that
with a new code of morals.
B. Nietzsche asks: where does Christianity and its moral values
c o me f r o m, a n d h o w is i t th a t h u ma n b e i n g s h a v e a
conscience?
C. Nietzsche identifies two kinds of morality. Christianity
represents only one particular perspective on judgements of
good and evil which is the perspective of the herd.
1. Herd mo rals are ch arac teristic of the wea k, feeb le,
inferior and enslaved (Christianity).
2. Master mora ls a re those of warrio rs, the preda tory
hu man be ings whose judg men ts a re based on the ir
strength rather than weakness.

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III. Nietzsche argues that the origins of judgments of moral value lie
in the violence imposed upon the weak peoples of the world by
the strong. The predatory behavior of warrior/aristocrats and the
judgments of value that lay behind them was the original ''good,"
the sufferings and sacrifices of the conquered was the "bad."
A. The distinction between good and evil is fundamentally
different in that it is the reactive valuation of the weak and
feeble.
B. Christianity, the locus of this scheme of valuation, is
mythological formulation of the resentment of slaves.
Strength, superiority, and heroism are sacrificed to piety.
C. N ie tz sc h e b e l ie ve d th a t h u ma n b e in g s a re p ri ma r il y
motivated by the desire to acquire power over nature, other
people and themselves. Cruelty is one of the manifestations of
the will to power and the origin of the conscience is in pain,
not the voice of God.
D. In the section of the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals, he analyzes
the psychology of the priest, considered as the opposite type
to the warrior/aristocrat, the hero.
1. The priest is the leader of the human herd, who
articulates the resentment of herd animals and distills
from their fear and envy the life denying ideals of
asceticism.
2 . Denigration of the flesh and the world is symptomatic of a
disguised nihilism that the will of God is the will to
nothing.

4 1994 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

 LectureTwo: Nietzsche's Perspectivalism and
Critique of Philosophy
Professor Darren Staloff

I. Nietzsche's Gay Science was his most personal book,

comprised of a series of aphorisms, poems, riddles, jokes and
songs.
A . N ie tz sc h e 's w o rk a t te mp t s to o v e r c o me th e d re a r y,
systematic nature of traditional philosophy.
B . He endeavors to be edifying and playful, to offer wisdom
rather than a lie called "truth."

II. Nietzsche was a systematic thinker whose central doctrine was

perspectivalism.
A. Perspectivalism holds that all of our concepts, language, and
culture represent perspectives we impose on experience to
create a "world."
B. Perspectivalism runs in two directions, external and
internal.
1. Externally, it takes the form of scientific realism, which
perspectivalism shows to be dogmatic.
2. Internally, it underlies our internal realism of the self.

III. Gay Science is about creating and cherishing individuals, as

opposed to commonality and universality.
A . T h e b o o k a llu d e s to th e G a y S a b e r o f th e P ro ve n c e
troubadors, who were the first to create individuality.
B . This text is a study of Nietzsche's psychological experience of
world-weariness and its philosophical results.
IV. The text is a compilation of various poems and works of prose,
enticing the reader to investigate his thorny, pricklish issues.
A. "Joke, Cunning and Revenge," is the poetic and playful
introduction to his work, self, meta-ethical critique, and
critique of Christianity.
B. Book I preaches tough love.
1. The doctrine of the feeling of power has been
misunderstood.
2 . He believes we are all full of the will to power, but he did
not favor the infliction of cruelty and suffering, because
this is the will to power of a weak man.
C. Book II discusses women, another misunderstood topic.
D. Book III takes up the topic of epistemology, covering the
origins of knowledge and cause and effect.
E. Nietzsche discusses herd instinct and herd remorse.
F. The final section covers the death and dying of Socrates and
the most important aphorism, The Greatest Weight, or the
doctrine of eternal return.

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 Lecture Three: James' Pragmatism
Professor Darren Staloff

I. William James' (1842-1910) Pragmatism is one of the most

important and enduring philosophical projects of the last 100
years.
A. James' pragmatism was the American version of
Nietzschean perspectivalism.
B . Jame s pu t an A me rican spin on h is p erspec tiva lism,
celebrating tolerance, openness, and democratic
egalitarianism.

II. James' democratic ethos is exemplified in the rhetoric of

Pragmatism. The text is pitched to the layman or common
educated person because James believed the average person
ought be the ultimate judge of philosophical issues.

III. James opens the discussion with a lecture entitled, "The present
dilemma in philosophy."
A. He interprets the longstanding philosophical dispute
between the rationalist/German idealist and
empiricist/positivist traditions as the clash between two
different temperaments, the tender-minded and
tough-minded.
B. The rational person wants the good things on both sides of
the dispute, and pragmatism enables him/her to have them.

IV. For James, pragmatism is both a method and a theory of truth.

A. The method argues that the meaning of an expression is
determined by the experiences or consequences that would
ensue if it were true.
B. The pragmatic theory of truth is "genetic." We invent new
truths to cope with anomalous experiences, and such
invention is limited.

V. James applies the pragmatic method to several longstanding

metaphysical problems including the dispute between
materialism and spiritualism.
A. Materialism teaches that the sun will super-nova and the
universe will die and all our aspirations and projects will
have meant nothing whereas spiritualism gives us ground to
hope that somehow and somewhere our achievements and
examples will persist, if only in the mind of God.

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 B. Determinism means that the future will resemble the past,
and this can lead to pessimism and despair. Free-will
pragmatically means that we can expect novelties in the
future. It is therefore possible that the world can be made
better, a doctrine James calls meliorism in contrast to either
optimism or pessimism
C. The doctrine of God or design assures us that everything will
work out in the wash, and thus allows us to take the
occasional moral holiday.
D. James concludes that pragmatism represents a philosophical
"protestant reformation" or rebellion against authority on
behalf of the individual.
VI. Toward the end of his series, James turned to a more complete
account of the pragmatic or "instrumental" theory of truth. True
beliefs are instruments of action, not eternal copies of the world
or thoughts in God's mind.
A. James urges that this theory is humanistic. The world is not a
fixed given that we must correspond to, but is made over in
our image as we parse it and work on it.
B. By naming things and properties we break up the flux of
experience, parse it, and "humanize it" or make it serviceable
for our human needs.
C. Culture thus changes or "mutates" according to evolutionary
dictates. Beliefs are called true when they have a survival
value. Common sense is just the fund of such previously
effective beliefs and posits.

1994 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 7

 Lecture Four: A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and
Logic
Professor Darren Staloff

I. Logical positivism is one of the most important philosophic

movements Of the twentieth century. The positivists were
responding to two important phenomena in their environment.
A. First was the profusion of speculative metaphysical systems
in the post-Kantian epoch that threatened to reduce
p h ilo so p h y to a se rie s o f e q u a ll y a b su rd fl i g h ts o f
imaginative fancy. Hence, the "positivistic" or pro-science
stance.
B. Second was the culmination of a revolution in symbolic logic
that had commenced in the nineteenth century with Cantor
and Boole and took off with Frege and the foundational
mathematical researches of Russell and Whitehead in
Principia Mathematica. Hence, "logical" positivism.

II. Ayer's text, a "young man's book" full of bluff and bluster is a
positivist manifesto of the doctrines shared by the famed
"Vienna Circle" whose philosophic lineage was, according to
Ayer, Berkeley and Hume.

III. Ayer begins his text with a chapter entitled, "The Elimination of
Metaphysics." He achieves this goal by analyzing the form of
metaphysical sentences and demonstrating that they violate the
criteria for literal significance and are thus nonsensical.
A. Metaphysical sentences fail to express propositions, which
a r e th e o n l y b e a re rs o f t ru th v a lu e s a n d a r e e i th e r
factual/synthetic or tautological/analytic.
B. Metaphysical sentences are linguistic expressions without
cognitive content, neither true nor false, but rather, literal
nonsense.
IV. The function of philosophy is critical rather than speculative. Its
proper task is to analyze various problems and issues and clarify
our linguistic usages.

V. The nature of philosophic analysis is to offer definitions for

terms.
A . U n l i k e t h e l e x i c o g r a p h e r w r i t i n g a d i c ti o n a r y, t h e
philosopher does not give explicit definitions which are
based on synonym, but rather definitions in use.

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 B. Such definitions translate a symbol into equivalent sentences
which contain neither the symbol nor any of its synonyms.
VI. Propositions are either analytic/tautological or synthetic/factual.
A. Analytic propositions (a priori) are raised for the empiricist
by the problem of accounting for mathematics and logic.
B. Synthetic propositions are empirical hypotheses. Unlike
tautologies, there can be no certain knowledge of such
propositions

VII. Having delimited the range of literally significant sentences,

Ayer turns to an analysis of the traditional philosophic fields of
ethics and theology.
A. Ethical statements comprise four classes; definitions of
ethical terms, descriptions of moral phenomena and their
causes, exhortations to virtue, and ethical judgments. The
first class is ethical philosophy proper, the second is social
science, the third is self-explanatory, and the fourth is
literally meaningless.
B. Ayer proves that it is impossible to prove demonstratively
that God exists. Talk of God is either about everything or
nothing, and thus "God" is not a genuine name.

VIII. Philosophy, for Ayer, is the handmaid of science.

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 Lecture Five: The Latter Wittgenstein:
The Philosophy of Language
Professor Michael Sugrue

I. Wittgenstein's early work the Tractatus is one of the great

manifestos Of positivism. It is decisive in the skepticism it
advocates and the position it takes with regard to logic and
thought.
A. It contains a theory of the declarative sentence, of what can
be put into a proposition and what cannot. Anything that
can be said, can be said clearly or not at all.
B. Propositions in logic and mathematics say nothing about the
world. When false, they are contradictions; when true, they
are tautologies.
C. "Atomic propositions," or complexes of such simple
propositions, describe the contingent states of affairs in the
other world.
D. All other utterances are nonsensical. There can be no
propositions in ethics, aesthetics or theology because words
cannot sensibly refer to such things.

II. The most important of Wittgenstein's works is a The Logical

Investigations. It is a sort of exercise in philosophical humility
and it talks about the practical contingency of language.
A. He treats language as a game, as a set of social practices
which overlap and don't have one universal key.
1. The plurality and diversity of linguistic acts prevents the
construction of an architectonic theory of language.
2. In the absence of a totalizing metalanguage, we are
limited to understanding and using the rules covering
the various overlapping "language games" current
among different communities and forms of life.
B. Ostensive definition explains two of Wittgenstein's favorite
questions which were, "How is this word learned?" and "How
is this word used?"
C. Family resemblance is that common nouns refer to groups or
kinds of things which are united not by a Platonic form (an
essence which every x has and only x has), but by a rough
resemblance between them, (like that between family
members).
D. Private languages refer to private symbols that cannot be
defined because language is intrinsically social.

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III. Wittgenstein's aim of his philosophy is to "let the fly get out of the
fly bottle."
A. His theme is, don't ask for the meaning, ask for the use. If it
is still unclear ask how the word is learned.
B. The problem with the investigation is that it is incomplete.
There are an infinite number of overlapping language games
and no ultimate finale to the philosophical enterprise.

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 Lecture Six: The Existential Insight:
Sartre and Heidegger
Professor Michael Sugrue

I. The nineteenth century origins of existentialism begin with

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Both emphasized arbitrary decision,
irrational commitment, and the anguish of the individual forced
to confront the questions posed by a morally chaotic world.

II. Heidegger (1889-1976) attempted a critique of the western

philosophical tradition, especially of Socrates, and tried to
recover the Pre-Socratic apprehension of the human condition.
A. He attempted to construct presuppositionless philosophy
which interrogated the mode of existence of human beings in
the world; "Dasein."
B. He is not so much interested in what things there are as in
what it is for anything to be; or in what there is as opposed
to what it is to think.
C. Heidegger emphasized the contingency, the groundlessness,
the anxiety of the human condition. Dasein requires that we
confront the terrifying fact that we must ask questions that
we know in advance have no satisfactory answers.
D. Heidegger's belief is that philosophy is always "tmterwegs"
in the sense of never reaching any final, universal solution
to the problems posed by human being or human beings.

III. Sartre (1905-1980) worked out the details of what was entailed
in being a Cartesian subject in a world of uncertainty.
A. We are not en-soi (objects) but pour-soi (conscious human
subjects) and are thus condemned to freedom.
B. The human condition requires the authentic confrontation
with freedom and responsibility in a moral vacuum.
Anything that allows us to shrug off the terrible burden of
freedom is in bad faith or self deception.

IV. The existentialist tradition is better exemplified in literature than

in works of philosophy. This explains why existentialism is the
intellectual heir of nineteenth century Romanticism.
A. Existentialism is an egoistic cult of the individual.
B. B e n e a th th e se n t i me n t a l p ra i se o f a u th e n tic i t y a n d
commitment, lies a despair that would have been heroic if it
hadn't been so self indulgent and full of whining.
C. Existentialism articulated the disorientation of twentieth
century life.

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 Lecture Seven: Habermas' Critical Theory
Professor Michael Sugrue
I. The Frankfurt School of Social Research was known for its social
critics, sociologists, and philosophers who formulated a critique
of advanced capitalist society using concepts borrowed from the
Hegelian/Marxist tradition, Freudian psychoanalysis, and
modern linguistic philosophy.
A. The unity of the work of the Frankfurt school is best seen in
the running dispute they had with the members of the
Vienna Circle about the methods of social science.
B. Hempel and other positivists wished to subsume social
science under natural science in a roughly Humean manner.
The School insisted that the "human" sciences were separate
from the natural sciences.

II. A social crisis develops when the political, economic, and

sociocultural systems fail to perform their functions and erode
the normative structures which legitimize them.
A. The Mandan crisis of economy has been displaced into the
realm of culture.
B. When the politic al sys te m fa ces a ra tiona lity crisis,
legitimization is undermined, and a crisis in the
so c io c u ltu ra l s yste m l e a d s to a c ri sis in in d iv id u a l
motivation and anomie.
C. The only social structure that can be legitimized without
coercion is one that does not suppress generalizable
interests.

III. An important result of Habermas' "critical theory" has been in

the left wing criticism of law. He makes the Kantian assumption
that only autonomous law (in the new incarnation of
"generalizable interests") can be reasonably defended as such,
and that pointing out heteronomous elements in positive law is a
step toward moving from the theory to the practice of justice.
IV. Habermas in particular, and the Frankfurt School in general
have been vehemently opposed to the "instrumental" conception
of Reason, which is essentially a reassertion of the Greek and
Kantian view that reason can disclose ends as well as means.
A. Habermas appears to have been awakened by the conception
of reason intrinsic to positivism, and his program is
analogous to that of Kant.
B. All protestations to the contrary, critical theory is an heir to
European Rationalism.

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 Lecture Eight: Kuhn's Paradigm Paradigm
Professor Darren Staloff

I. Thomas Kuhn's landmark study, The Structure of Scientific

Revolutions, is perhaps the most influential high cultural text
of the twentieth century. Kuhn's exposure to the history of
science led him to conclude that the positivist theory of science
c o u ld n o t a d e q u a te l y a c c o u n t fo r th e a c tu a l h isto r ic a l
development of the various sciences.

II. Kuhn argues against the received conception of science as the

history of steady and incremental accumulation of individual
discoveries, observations and inventions.
A. Kuhn argues that the history of science is characterized by
periods of peaceful and normal research punctuated by
epochs of crisis and scientific revolution.
B. Kuhn's theory of science replaces the logical positivist's
rational reconstruction with an historical sociology of
scientific knowledge and communities.

III.What distinguishes mature from immature science is the large

degree of consensus held by the various practitioners of a given
discipline.
A. The early, immature development of most sciences is
characterized by continual competition between distinct
views of nature, each of which is compatible with the
dictates of scientific observation and method.
B. Effective research, or normal science, doesn't begin until a
community of scientists agree about the basic entities.
C. This agreement is reached by means of one or many
paradigms; without paradigms, all facts seem equally
relevant.

IV. A paradigm is "a universally recognized scientific achievement

that for a time provides model problems and solutions to a
community of practitioners."
A. Paradigms are prior to thy rationally reconstructed "rules of
science."
B. Such rules or methodological issues only become an issue of
concern during periods of paradigm crisis.
C. The priority of paradigms to pure theories and rules is
exemplified in the pedagogy of science and scientific
textbooks.

14 1994 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

 D. Paradigms limit the range of acceptable questions and
relevant facts.

V. Normal science or research is paradigm based. Kuhn describes

normal science as "mopping up" the facts displayed by the
paradigm and the paradigm's predictions.
A. The problems of normal scientific research and
experimentation fall under three heads or categories.
1. In vestigating fac ts wh ich the para dig m sa ys a re
"particularly revealing."
2. Investigating esoteric facts that can be compared to the
paradigm's predictions.
3. Research done to extend or articulate the paradigm,
resolve its ambiguities, and solve problems which had
hitherto only drawn attention.
B. Normal science is a sort of puzzle solving. A paradigm offers
problems that are presumably solvable, and other problems
are d ismissed as "me taph ysical" or irre le van t to the
discipline at hand.

VI. Anomalies are facts or phenomena which violate the expectation

of the paradigm. The persistence and proliferation of anomalies
generate scientific crises.
A. Scientific crises are resolved in three ways; normal scientific
research is conducted, no solution is found and the problem
is shelved, or a new paradigm emerges.
B. No paradigm is ever destroyed by its anomalies, for
anomalies can be suppressed for some time. However, an old
paradigm can be replaced by a new one.

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 Lecture Nine: Quine's Ontological Relativism
and the End of 'Philosophy"
Professor Darren Staloff

I. Willard Quine is among the most profound and important

philosophers of the twentieth-century, as well as one of its most
eminent logicians. In the background of his work and "historical
moment" were a series of setbacks to the positivist attempt to
reduce mathematics to logic.

II. Quine directs his criticism at the foundational or "Kantian"

elements of logical positivism.
A. Positivist linguistic analysis and epistemology tried to
constitute itself as a "first philosophy" that foundationally
and unequivocally established the meaning of expressions or
discourse.
B. The positivist program presupposes that any language or
theory possesses a determinate meaning or contains fixed
structural/conceptual features.

III. Quine's first large scale attack on logical positivism is entitled,

"Two Dogmas of Empiricism." The first dogma is the belief that
there is a basic and fundamental distinction between analytic
and synthetic truths. The second dogma is reductionism.
A. An analytic sentence is true solely on the basis of meanings
rather than facts. This view is unsupportable.
B. Reductionism is strongly related to the first dogma and also
supports it. It too is untenable.
C. Quine likens "total science" or the sum of our knowledge to a
field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.

IV. Quine's most powerful attack on the positivists is Ontological

Relativity and Other Essays. Quine's thesis is that when we
specify the entities in some theory/language (the object
language) we do so by translating sentences with those entities
into another background theory/language (the meta-language)
which is rich and more inclusive.
A. The ontological import of an object language is relative to
the meta-language into which it is translated. The
meta-language of last resort is our "home language", in our
case vernacular English.

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 B. Taking the case of radical translation, Quine demonstrates
that translation is indeterminate. Such translation hinges on
the choice of "analylic hypotheses" for translating the new
language into the familiar idiom. Hence, "double" relativity.
C. Quine argues that reference in our home language can also be
inscrutable.
V. The result of Quine's work is that foundational analysis of
linguistic meanings is rendered impossible.
A. It would seem that there is nothing left called "philosophy"
which is distinguishable from science.
B. Quine offers "epistemology naturalized," which is the
empirical study of how a particular species uses its symbolic
systems to erect scientific theories and explanations.

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 Lecture Ten: Rorty's Neo-Pragmatism
Professor Darren Staloff

I. Richard Rorty is one of the most profound and influential

philosophers on the current high-cultural scene. He has
attempted to move post-analytic American philosophy in a
pragmatic direction. His pragmatism is deeply informed by a
c o mmi t me n t t o d e mo c r a c y, n a tu r a li s m, t o l e ra n c e , a n d
intellectual openness as well as a profound awareness of the
contingency of such values and institutions.

II. Much of Rorty's work critiques the modern Philosophic tradition

that centers around the problems of Truth and Reality. In
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, he suggests that the
history of modern epistemology can be seen, from Descartes to
the present, as based on the notion that there is a medium
standing between ourselves and the world and which, either
adequately or inadequately, "mirrors" the world.

III. Rorty claims that what underlies such Philosophical projects, and
what unites them with their Platonic forerunners, is the desire to
constitute Philosophy as Meta-cultural criticism, the result of
having achieved a "God's eye-view."
A. The goal is for the philosopher to stand above all the other
high-cultural disciplines and tell them what is meaningful
and legitimate and what is not.
B. Rorty argues that a truly secular culture will have no such
architectonic discipline, but will allow free play between the
various disciplines and fields.

IV. In Consequences of Pragmatism, Rorty argues that pragmatism

is the ultimate opponent of Philosophy in both its Metaphysical
and Positivistic/Analytic forms.
A. Truth, for Rorty, is a property of sentences such as "2+2=4,"
or "cruelty is bad." He thinks that truth is a compliment we
pay to sentences that work for us, and thus "truth is what is
good in the way of belief."
B. Correspondence theories of Truth assume that language is a
medium of representation that we can compare to some fixed
and final Reality.
C. Philosophy should try to show how our various descriptions
and actions "hang together," rather than trying to offer
epistemological Foundations for our beliefs.

18 1994 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

V. In Contingency. Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty tries to show how
his edifying pragmatic discources "hang together" with the
c o n t e mp o r a r y d e m o c r a t i c p r o j e c t s o f t h e W e s t , c a l l e d
"postmodern bourgeois liberalism."
A. He argues that post-Hegelian inquiry has shown us the
contingency of our language, beliefs, and institutions. This
allows us to see how we might redescribe ourselves and our
institutions, and how there is no Reality, Truth, or Goodness
to which we must subject ourselves.
B. Ironists are people who realize the contingency of their "final
vocabularies" and have doubts about it, realize that their
present vocabularies cannot resolve or underwrite these
doubts, and don't think that their vocabulary corresponds to
reality or taps into an extrahuman/metaphysical power.
C. For Rorty, liberals are people who think cruelty is the worst
thing we can do. Moral education is achieved through the
reading of literature, which sensitizes us to the suffering of
others, including their humiliation, and helps us redescribe
others as "us."

1994 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 19

 Lecture Eleven: Reviewing the Western
Tradition
Professor Michael Sugrue

I. Athens and Jerusalem:

A. Mythos, the mythic narrative which runs down the center of
Weste rn c ulture, is the Hebrew Bib le and the Greek
testament. For religious believers, God's Word is reality and
God's commands are authoritatively revealed in scripture.
B. These stories satisfy the need for moral order, sanction,
benevolent sentiments and offer a meaning for human
existence. Overarching symbolism of God and Trinity
includes: God the Father; Jesus; and The Holy Ghost.
C. Logos, the critical, Irational, humanistic perspective of the
Greek tradition is instantiated in the culture of Athens
around the age of Pericles.
1. While the myths of Homer and Plato have great power
and beauty it is the tradition of offering rational
c ritic ism o f myth s th a t c re a tes th e first se cu lar
knowledge.
2. The Pre-Socratic physicists formulated alternatives to the
mythical accounts of physis (nature), and the sophists
offered alternatives to the mythical accounts of nomos
(political law).
D. The Western tradition is a braid of the intellectual traditions
which stem from Athens and Jerusalem. The Christian
virtues of faith, hope, and charity are connected with the
Platonic virtues of wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice.

II. Reason and Emotion:

A. There is a tension between the rational and non-rational
sides of the human psyche. While all major intellectual
trends have offered something to both elements of the mind,
it is po ssib le to d isting u ish b e twe en two g rou p s of
intellectual tendencies with regard to the emphasis on
reason and emotion.
B. The rationalistic Socratic tradition stresses the discipline of
the emotions.
C. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Age of Science
were the great Socratic periods in Western culture.
III. Idealism and Realism:
A. The conflict between metaphysics and naturalism is the core
of the modern Western tradition.
B. This dialectic is epitomized and given literary form in
Sancho Panza and Don Quixote. The historical tension
between dogmatism and skepticism is never completely
resolved.

20 1994 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

 Lecture Twelve: Conclusion:
Reviewing the Western Tradition II
Professor Michael Sugrue

I. Historical Development and Western Culture:

A. Rome (c.400 B.C.-400 A.D.).
1. Roman culture was Hellenistic. Its high culture derived
from classical Greece, but an enormous range of
influence from all over the Mediterranean basin and
beyond contributed to its development.
2. Roman epic, tragedy, comedy, sculpture, and mythology
are Greek. Rome achieved most in practical concerns like
government, engineering, and architecture.
B. The Christian Ages (400-1400 A.D.).
1. The most important cultural entity to survive the
German invasions (which led to the collapse of the
Roman Empire) was Christianity. The Church imparted
to the entire culture of Western Europe a dogmatically
theocentric orientation which lasted over 1000 years.
2. Du ring th is time , th e re wa s little re ga rd fo r the
individual, the body or the world of the senses. Every
part of culture was Christian.
C. The Renaissance (1400-1600 A.D.). 1. The Age of Faith,
dominated by Jerusalem, was undermined by, among other
things, the introduction of Islamic copies of Greek texts,
particularly into Italy, which has the closest cultural
connections with classical civilization. 2. Culture was
secularized and humanized.
D. The Reformation (1520-1660 A.D.).
1. The Protestant Reformation was a northern European
response to the paganism of the Renaissance.
2. The Catholic church had incorporated many elements of
classical civilization in the previous 1500 years, and the
Reformation attempted to cleanse Christianity of all
nonscriptural elements.
3. Intellectual life centered around God, and while such
noteworthy intellectual achievements as Calvin's
Institutes were produced, the Reformation subordinated
Reason to Faith.
4. The practical consequences of the Reformation and
Catholic Counter Reformation were the wars of religion,
which had catastrophic cultural results.

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 E. The Enlightenment (1600-1800 A.D.), saw a movement from
God to Nature as the main focus of intellectual life.
1. Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes developed modern physics
and Newton described the mechanical universe with an
unprecedented mathematical precision. The application
of the new physics lead to the technological
developments of the industrial revolution like Watt's
steam engine.
2. The development of a human, rather than divine,
political theory generated a new concern forman in the
"state of nature."
3. Social contractarian theories of Hobbes, Locke, and
Rousseau, lead to democratizing revolutions.
4. N a t u r a l i s t i c a p p r o a c h e s t o k n o w l e d g e l e d t o
Montesquieu's relativism, Hume's moral Epicureanism
and Smith's dismal science
5. T he E n lig h te n me n t was c en te re d in E n g la nd a nd
France. Germany's contributions came in the late
eighteenth century because the damage done by the
wars of religion took a century to repair and hindered
cultural activity.
F. Romanticism (1789-1865 A.D.) is the poetic revolt against
the industrial revolution. Romantics celebrate the subjective,
the emotional, the heroic, and the unique. They admire deep
sentiments and distrust deep thought.
1. It is easy to see why Kierkegaard, Hegel, and Burke,
personally so different, are all described as Romantics.
2. Visual art, music and literature were the strong points of
Romanticism.
3. G e r m a n s p e a k i n g c o u n t r i e s m a d e t h e g r e a t e s t
contributions to Romanticism: Beethoven, Goethe, Hegel,
and Schliermacher.
4. In England, Ro ma ntic ism a lso had a c onside rable
influence: Blake, Byron, Keats, Shelly, Carlyle, Burke,
and Turner.
5. The French are also well repesented: Napolean, Comte,
Berlioz, Stendahl, and Michelet.
6. During the Romantic age the United States begins to
make increasingly substantial contributions to Western
culture: Jacksonian Democracy, Whitman, Poe, Melville,
Emerson, and Thoreau,

22 1994 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

G. The Age of Science (1859-1918).
1. France and England were the leaders in the cultural
counterattacks made by the friends of reason and science
in the last half of the nineteenth century.
2. Darwin's theory of evolution and Maxwell's equations,
combined with Pasteur's biological research and Frege's
logical achievements, created an age of scientific advance
which culminated in the special theory of relativity in
1905.
3. After the Civil War, the U.S. saw a rise in science and
technology and a new generation of literary realists
including Steven Crane, Jack London and the
Muckrakers.
4. In Russia, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov Plekhanov, and of
course, Bolshevism represent the increasing influence of
science on culture.
H. The Age of the Ego (1890-present).
1. The end of the Age of Science a century ago resulted in
the creation of a new and more powerful Romanticism.
2. The twentieth century has been the age of subjectivity,
irrationality, and fragmentation.
3. The boundaries of previously integral units have been
broken down, and what Einstein and other physicists did
in splitting the atom is analogous to what Freud did in
splitting the subject into its component parts.
4. The fragmentation of the self is a recurrent theme in
twentieth century literature. Joyce, Faulkner, Beckett,
Kafka, Camus, Sartre, and Lawrence, all deal with the
c h a o s o f h u ma n e mo t i o n , t h e a n g u i s h o f m o r a l
uncertainty, and the burden of subjectivity.
5. The Vienna Circle attempted an important project of
deriving mathematics from logic, and connecting logic
and physics to form a comprehensive scientific approach
to the world.

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 SUGGESTED READING LIST TO
ACCOMPANY
The Great Minds of The Western Intellectual Tradition
Part Five: Modernism and the Age of Analysis
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. by Walter
Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, (Random House), and The Gay
Science, translated by Walter Kaufmann, (Random House).
William James, Pragmatism and Four Ess. From the Meaning of
Truth, (New American Library).
A.J. Ayer, Language. Truth and Logic, (Dover Publications).

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by

G.E. M. Anscombe, 2nd ed., (Oxford University Press).
Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings from Being and Time to The Task
of Thinking,, (Harper and Row).

Jean-P aul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on

P h e n o me n o l o g i c a l O n t o l o g y, t r a n s l a t e d b y H a z e l B a r n e s ,
(Philosophical Library).
Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, Theory and
Practice, and Legitimate Crisis, (all by Beacon Press).
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed.,
(University of Chicago Press).
Willard Van Orman Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," in From A
Logical Point of View: Nine Logical Essays, 2nd ed., (Harvard
University Press), and Ontological Relativity and Other Essays,
(Columbia University Press).
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, (Princeton
University Press), Consequences of Pragmatism, (University of
Min ne so ta P re ss), an d C on ting en c y, Iro n y. a n d S o lid a rity,
(Cambridge University Press).
ADDITIONAL
Arthur C. Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, (MacMillan). A classic
explication by one of the most eminent philosophers and most
beautiful writers of our time.
George Romans, Quine and Analytic Philosophy_, (M.I.T. Press). A
careful and accurate review of one of the intellectual giants of the
twentieth century.
24 1994 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership